The Patriarch (79 page)

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A
s Kennedy had predicted, President Truman’s proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to save Greece and Turkey from communism was followed by even larger requests.

In June 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall, speaking at the Harvard commencement, invited the nations of Europe to design a comprehensive economic recovery plan that the United States would fund. The proposal, which would be known as the Marshall Plan, had several objectives: to provide dollars to European nations to pay for American imports, to stabilize the European economies, and, most important, to forestall the economic crises that, it was widely feared, local Communist parties would capitalize on to win elections and seize power. When Kennedy wrote Kick that spring that he was sure “Italy and France will be definitely in the Communist orbit before the end of this year,” he was voicing what had become the accepted wisdom among Washington’s wise men.
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While Kennedy did not relish the idea of Communist-dominated governments and economies in Europe, he doubted that spending millions of American dollars was going to succeed in preserving democracy and capitalism abroad. On the contrary, he feared, it would exacerbate tensions with the Soviets and bring the world a step closer to war. He, of course, had the luxury of carefully balancing the pros and cons of Marshall’s plan before coming out for or against it. His son, the congressman from Massachusetts, did not. The voters in the eleventh district were staunchly anti-Communist and more than willing to spend American dollars to defeat or push back the Red menace.

Jack not only enthusiastically backed the Marshall Plan, but in the fall of 1947, undertook a fact-finding trip to Europe with two other congressman, one of them Richard Nixon, to investigate Communist influence on French and Italian labor. His first stop was Ireland, where he visited Kick at a castle owned by her in-laws. He was ill most of the time, though he did manage a visit to Dunganstown to meet his Irish cousins, the first of his family to do so.

On September 21, he returned to London en route to the continent and his fact-finding investigation. Arriving in London, he became so ill that he placed an emergency call to Kick’s friend Pamela Churchill. A doctor was located, examined Jack, and put him into the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease. He was flown home at once and admitted to a Boston hospital. The public was told that he suffered from a recurrence of his wartime malaria. For the rest of his life, Jack Kennedy would suffer and be treated for Addison’s disease while publicly declaring that he did not have it.

Jack had earlier agreed to be the keynote speaker at the fiftieth anniversary of the Cambridge Knights of Columbus on October 23. He was too ill to do so now and asked his father to pinch-hit. Though Kennedy’s views on the British loan, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan were out of line with his son’s, he remained enough of a political asset to serve as the congressman’s stand-in.

“I suppose a father is primarily interested more in his family than in any honor that can possibly come to him no matter how great it may be,” Kennedy began that evening in Cambridge. “My oldest boy ran for office here for the first time and became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.” The next line was going to be about Jack, but, Mark Dalton recalled, “the tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke of Joe and it took him about two minutes to get the grip.”
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Kennedy gathered himself and continued. He had, he reminded his audience, “opposed very bitterly the Truman Plan,” which, he did not add, his son had voted for. “I thought it was pouring money down the rathole.” He thought much the same about the Marshall Plan. Still, because the European nations were in dire economic distress, he was willing to “loan them five or six billion dollars or give it to them,” but only for a year. If, after that year, productivity was still low and organized labor uncooperative, or if any of the nations receiving American aid voted Socialists or Communists into their governments, the loans or gifts would not be renewed. He was not an anti-Communist hard-liner—and he made this clear. “I do not think it is the spread of Communism that is dangerous. . . . People are not embracing Communism as Communism, but they are discontented, insecure and unsettled and they embrace anything that looks like it might be better than what they have to endure. . . . It is very easy for anybody who has a job and is getting along all right to cry for democracy . . . but if you cannot feed your children and you do not know where the next meal is coming from, nobody knows what kind of freak you will follow.”
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I
n the spring of 1948, Kennedy returned to Europe for his first extended visit since he had left seven and a half years before. He was on a personal fact-finding mission of sorts, looking for material to use as ammunition in his fight against the Marshall Plan. He sailed on the
America
on April 14 and took “the Commish,” Joe Timilty, with him. Although he commanded far less press and attention than he once had, the Boston papers kept track of his trip and his pronouncements. While he was in Paris, on April 18, the Christian Democrats in Italy, with the assistance of millions of dollars provided clandestinely by the CIA, defeated the Popular Front coalition of Socialists and Communists by nearly two to one. When the
Boston Post
contacted Kennedy for his reaction, he responded, consistent with his undying pessimism, that the results of the election, with 35 percent of the electorate voting Communist [in reality, the vote was 31 percent for the coalition of Socialists and Communists], were “more alarming than reassuring.”
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Interviewed in Paris by Bill Cunningham of the
Boston Herald
about his aspirations for his children, he declared: “In two words, it’s Public Service.” Bobby had graduated from Harvard and was “traveling through Europe, and even down into Greece, Turkey and such troublous districts.” Travel abroad, Kennedy told Cunningham, had been instrumental in interesting and equipping Jack “for a career of public service.” He hoped and expected “the same for Robert, in fact, for all his children. Cunningham asked about the girls, and Kennedy cited the instance of “daughter Eunice, who’s in Washington as a special assistant to Atty.-Gen. Tom Clark, working particularly upon the problem of juvenile delinquency.” “What we need now is selfless, informed, sincere representation and service at home and abroad. . . . Please don’t misunderstand me as trying to imply that my children are any smarter, or any better qualified than anybody else’s children. But we chance to be in a position in which they can be spared the necessity of supporting themselves. Spared that, why shouldn’t they better try to qualify to serve their country in some needed capacity, great or small, as they can prove themselves worthy?” He had, he insisted, “no copyright on the idea,” but he hoped nonetheless that it “spread widely. There are many other young men and women in the United States whose families could easily afford to make the same decision, and who are possibly better qualified than my own children for great service to America and to the world. . . . That has been our family plan for our children from the first. If it doesn’t work out with them, it could work out with some others.”
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I
n May, Kennedy took the train to Rome for an audience with the pope, then returned to Paris to meet up with Kick, who was flying in with her fiancé, Peter Fitzwilliam. Only a few weeks earlier, Kick, at the tail end of her winter vacation in the United States, had informed the family that she intended to marry Fitzwilliam, an immensely wealthy, titled British Protestant, like Billy Hartington, but married, considerably older than Kick, and widely known as something of a bounder.

Kathleen Kennedy Hartington was, at age twenty-eight, three and a half years a widow and ready to move on. The year before, she had contemplated marriage to another “notorious ladies’ man,” also a Protestant, but her father had talked her out of it and she had been grateful to him for doing so. “Any ideas about that particular southern gentleman were passing fancies!” she had written him on her return to Great Britain. “You told me what you thought. I listened. The rest was up to me and in the cold light of morning after having the life I have had one doesn’t waste it going from El Morocco to the Stork Club. Not if one has any sense, one doesn’t.”
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She wasn’t going to be talked out of this marriage. Fitzwilliam was simply too charming, too rich, too gallant, too much fun. He had promised to divorce his wife to marry Kick. Jack had been the first to learn about Fitzwilliam during his trip to Ireland in August 1947, but he’d said nothing to his parents. When Rose heard about him that winter, she was so distraught at the prospect of her daughter besmirching her family’s good name by marrying a Protestant divorcé that she threatened to sever all ties with her and cut off her allowance. Kennedy was crushed into silence by the news, though he agreed, to his daughter’s surprise and joy, to meet with her and Fitzwilliam in Paris, perhaps to try one final time to convince them to back away from their marriage plans.

Fitzwilliam had planned to spend a few days with Kick in Cannes before they met Kennedy in Paris. He chartered a private two-engine, eight-seat plane for the trip. When they stopped over to refuel in Paris, he decided to have lunch with a few of his friends rather than fly at once to Cannes. By the time he and Kick were ready to proceed, a thunderstorm was developing over the Rhone Valley and all commercial flights had been grounded. Fitzwilliam argued with the pilot until he agreed to fly. Their plane took off at 3:20
P.M.
It never arrived.

Eunice Kennedy, who was working in Washington and shared a town house with Jack, was called to the phone at midnight by a
Washington Post
reporter who asked if the Lady Hartington reported killed in an airplane crash in France was her sister. She replied that there were two Lady Hartingtons. The reporter said that a passport had been found with the name Kathleen on it. Jack was reclining on a sofa listening to a recording of
Finian’s Rainbow
when Eunice told him what the reporter had said. He got in touch with Ted Reardon, his congressional assistant, and asked him to check on the story. Reardon phoned an hour later to confirm that it was indeed Kathleen who had died in the crash, along with Peter Fitzwilliam, and the plane’s pilot and co-pilot.

Kennedy was awakened in Paris at six thirty
A.M.
by Joe Timilty, who had gotten a call from Joe Dinneen of the
Boston Globe.
A half hour after he learned of his daughter’s death, he sat down to write her epitaph. “No one who ever knew her didn’t feel that life was much better that minute. And we know so little about the next world that we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves. We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves.” He then arranged to be taken to the crash site, just outside the town of Privas, and from there to the Town Hall, where four lead-lined coffins, covered by flowers, were awaiting identification. An official opened the lid on the coffin with the woman. It was Kick.
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Kick’s body was removed to a church in Paris until a decision could be made about where she should be buried. Kennedy had hoped that Jack would make arrangements to fly her body back to the United States for burial at Cape Cod, but Jack was too debilitated by grief to do anything. When Billy’s parents volunteered to bury her in the family plot at Chatsworth, Kennedy agreed.

We can only speculate as to why no member of the family save Kennedy attended Kick’s funeral. Had Jack been ready to fly to England, his sisters and perhaps his mother might have followed. But he was too broken to attempt the journey. Rose might have flown by herself or with her daughters. But she too was devastated. Rather than permit themselves to be swallowed up in the sea of mourners at Chatsworth—and grieve their daughter’s death with a Protestant family that held tight to Kathleen as one of their own—the Kennedys mourned Kick in their own way, in their own home.

On May 20, a High Mass was held for Kathleen Kennedy at the Farm Street Church near Berkeley Square in London. Joseph P. Kennedy was the only family member in attendance. After the Mass, he boarded a specially chartered train, with two hundred of Kick’s friends and her coffin, for the final journey to Derbyshire. “He wore a crumpled blue suit,” recalled Debo Devonshire, Kick’s sister-in-law, to author Barbara Leaming, “and he was crumpled just like the suit. I never saw anything like it.”
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The next day, Kennedy sailed for home. “He asked,” the
Boston Herald
announced on May 30, “that he be excused from being interviewed and photographed.” His wishes were respected.

He had lost the second of his four oldest children, a third was institutionalized, and he worried incessantly about the life expectancy of the fourth.

There would be no memorials to Kathleen Kennedy, no foundations or charities, no book of remembrances like the one Jack had put together for Joe Jr. The sad truth was that the family did not know how to tell her story. There were rumors at the time of her death that she had left the church, rumors put to rest by an article planted in the
Boston Post.
Rather than attempting to defend Kick’s decision to marry a Protestant or covering up the circumstances of her death, the Kennedys laid her public memory to rest with her. They would never cease to love her or to miss her or to speak lovingly of her among themselves, but they would not mention her life or the circumstances of her death in public.

Her death, just four years after Joe Jr.’s, was almost too much for her father to bear. The fact that his son had died in battle for a cause he thought just and died alongside so many other brave young men imbued his death with some meaning. Kathleen’s death had no meaning, had not been foretold or foreseen, as was the death of a soldier, and was, in that regard, more debilitating.